"Evening", here, is not the noun but the gerund
form of the verb "to even"; this leads the speaker to comment on her
own language and arrive at a line break that takes an idiom and makes it
literal:

And look how morning becomes
evening

accidentally, heuristically, in
the miracle

of language leading us up the
garden path

a white rabbit crosses, a badger,
our local fox

"To lead someone up the garden path" is the idiom
here, and before the line break, the sense is clear: "the miracle // of
language" deceives us, plays tricks on us – here, the trick of seeing or
hearing "evening" as a noun when, in context, it is actually a verb.
The relative clause that follows the line break, however, turns "the
garden path" into a literal path that the animals can cross.

Enjambment often
generates such a doubling of meaning, from figurative to literal (as here), or
in other cases from general to particular. This particular doubling stands out
because "the garden path" has a third meaning associated with language:
the "garden-path sentence." Such a sentence sets up a word or phrase
to be read one way but then turns out to require a different reading. And that,
of course, is what happens with examples of enjambment like the one above:
"leading us up the garden path" goes from being figurative to being
literal; it has to be reinterpreted for the two lines to fit together.

Hence, this
particular enjambment provides a general way to think about enjambment: as a "garden
path" effect in which one reading is replaced and often even displaced by
another. The garden-path sentence is further related to the rhetorical figure
of paraprosdokian, which means "against expectation" – and that is
precisely how enjambment works: it creates an expectation and then adds something that works against that expectation. So enjambment could be seen as a form of paraposdokian.
But more generally, it's the idea that enjambment behaves like a rhetorical
figure that seems useful to me – particularly strikingly so in the case of
Khalvati's poem, where the enjambment involves a figurative expression that is
also a term for a rhetorical figure. Or has the pun just led me, too, up the
garden path?

On the far wall. Hanging from one nail, an old velvet hat
with a tattered bit of

veiling—last
remnant of former finery.

(John Ashbery, Collected
Poems 1956–1987, Library of America, 162)

The poem does not say whether the picture in question is a
photograph, a painting, or even a drawing, but the image of the "Dutch
girl" is clear and vivid. It is a vision of ecstasy that also stands more
broadly for a genre of pictures in whatever format–Dutch pictures, of course,
with the tulips as further confirmation of the nationality of the image. The
image is both complete in itself and an image of completion, of elements
fitting together, of ecstasy as a momentary emotion of wholeness.

Yet this moment
of wholeness and even wholesomeness at the center of the passage is surrounded
by images of broken and tainted things. The calendar that contains the image is
"fly-specked"; it is seen only in its reflection in the water in a
"chipped" sink; above the sink is "a broken mirror"; the
"veiling" on the hat hanging on the wall is "tattered". A
"broken mirror" does not produce accurate reflections; whoever looks
into it will see a distorted version of themselves, and the room described so
precisely here will also be distorted. The water in the basin is also a kind of
"broken mirror" that also offers a distorted vision of the room. With
the hat, the broken doubling of reflections is replaced by the concealment of a
veil–but it, too, does not work as it should. The veil, like the mirror, does
not serve its purpose effectively. All this "former finery" frames an
image of the ecstasy that such finery could create, if it still existed. All
that remains of ecstasy is the image of ecstasy–all that remains of an
aesthetic of wholeness and sentiment is this "fly-specked" image from
a calendar hanging in a room full of broken things.

Wednesday, June 07, 2017

I've been teaching at the Pomeranian University in Slupsk in Poland this week, my second week here after a week in March. One of the courses I have been asked to teach is on contemporary literature, so of course I made it into a course on contemporary Anglophone poetry.

I gave the students a collection of 20 poems published in the last 20 years, from Seamus Heaney's "The Rain Stick" to Danez Smith's "Dinosaurs in the Hood." I chose two of the poems not just because I find them worth pondering but also because they are poems that went viral: Patricia Lockwood's "Rape Joke" and Maggie Smith's "Good Bones".

Today, we talked about "Good Bones" and what features it has that contribute to its having gone viral. It was a combination of its simplicity (a fairly clear message) and its complexity (the message highlights the difficulty of communicating something simply and honestly). In addition, the poem's repetitions and variations amount to looking at its issues from a variety of different angles, which adds to its effectiveness.

We also discussed another poem that has often been shared after traumatic events around the globe, Adam Zagejewski's "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" (trans. Clare Cavanagh). I don't speak Polish, but we looked at the Polish original as well, and I considered how someone who knows only what the title means might be able to piece together something about the poem.

In particular, I noticed the repetition of a line from the title through the rest of the poem:

It's cheating a bit, of course, since I am familiar with the English translation, but I was struck by how much can be said about the Polish original just by paying attention to these lines. Each of the lines ends with the same three words, and the first line means "try to praise the mutilated world," so though I didn't remember which modals are used in the repetitions of the line, I was able to remember that the poem's variations are on the line are variations in modal verbs, and I concluded that the final repetition must (musisz?) be an indicative "I praise" or an imperative "praise". As with Smith's "Good Bones", Zagajewski's poem works as a theme with variations that provides multiple angles on a simple message. As a result, neither poem can be reduced to its message, and both can appeal to a wide range of readers, which offers a kind of explanation of what it is that makes a poem go viral.

A final note: the students in the course are studying to be translators, and they were all very impressed by Clare Cavanagh's translation.

Monday, March 27, 2017

This is the first paragraph of Jane Austen's Persuasion as it appears in the Norton Critical Edition that I am using with my students:

A

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire,
was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the
Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed
one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by
contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome
sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and
contempt. As he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century – and
there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with
an interest which never failed – this was the page at which the favourite
volume always opened:

And this is the first paragraph as it appears in various online versions that I have come across, including whatever version it was I downloaded a few years ago for me and my students to work with:

B

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire,
was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the
Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed
one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by
contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome
sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and
contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century;
and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history
with an interest which never failed. This was the page at which the favourite
volume always opened:

The anaphora with "there" is much more effectively handled in B than in A, in which the last "there" is not part of the previous list of constructions beginning with "there".

The Norton Critical Edition says it is based on the first edition, but it makes me wonder about the punctuation of the first edition! And it also makes me wonder where B comes from!

Still, to my mind, the pattern of the words in this paragraph points towards punctuation along the lines of B, whose rhetorical structure is much more like Austen than A is.